


Feeling Through the Waves

by SalazarTipton



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Bad Alpha Scott McCall (Teen Wolf), Bad Friend Scott, Canon-Typical Violence, Empath Stiles Stilinski, M/M, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Steter Week 2018, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-23
Updated: 2018-07-23
Packaged: 2019-06-14 21:06:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15397440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SalazarTipton/pseuds/SalazarTipton
Summary: Siltes thought about telling Scott the truth for less than a second before remember the guy's having a hard enough time accepting that werewolves exist. Opening up his supernatural worldview to include empaths is out of the question. Besides, Claudia told him no one can ever know. Of course Peter freaking Hale has to come and mess that up.





	Feeling Through the Waves

**Author's Note:**

> happy steter week, everybody!!! hope you like <3 
> 
> special thanks to the steter network for the word sprints and help. y'all are an absolute wonder!

Stiles adores music, always has. Even when he was little, he’d follow the songs through the house, downstairs to where his mother was playing her old, antique piano that use to belong to his great great whatever. Her gentle melodies filled Stiles with warmth and light as if the notes each held a pearl of her love for him. He didn’t know it then, but when she was alone in the house, her songs weren’t so light. They twisted downward, so sollumn the vase of flowers in the dining room wilted before the song was done. The week before her death, she wouldn’t even sing for Stiles, no matter how much he begged to hear her songs--wanting that warm feeling that accompanied her voice. He couldn’t understand why until much later when his dad explained. 

 

Claudia was part of a long line of empaths. Stiles is an empath. She hadn’t had the time to teach Stiles how she wanted about his abilities and how to shield himself from the world because he hadn’t presented yet. She taught John what to look out for, how to spot when it was time to explain. That’s when his dad gave Stiles her journals. 

 

No one aside from his dad knows about Stiles’ connection to music. It’s his release. He’d felt drawn to it the first time he was overwhelmed with the feelings of others. He stole himself away in his makeshift fort out back and sung himself one of the songs his mom used to sing. John stumbled outside towards him with tears shining on his cheeks. Stiles release had reached into the house even though he was being so quiet. John couldn’t hear him until he moved the blanket-door to find Stiles rocking himself, singing. 

 

Forgetting the emotional side-effects, Stiles has carefully crafted the facade that he’s so tone deaf even his worst enemies shouldn’t have to hear him sing. Even Scott doesn’t know. 

 

Stiles considered telling him after Peter bit Scott...for about two seconds. Seeing Scott’s inability to function when it came to anything supernatural and utter surprise anything aside from werewolves existed squashed his idea. Opening open his supernatural worldview would serve him well, but Stiles decided he’s not the man for that job. Besides, in his mother’s notes it says about a billion times that  _ no one can know _ . 

 

If channeling all the emotional energy in a high school wasn’t enough, adding werewolf full moon attitude on top of it sure was. He wasn’t used to channeling so much aggression. Stiles’ dad jokes about regretting buying him a drum set. He’s breaking sticks faster than he can earn new ones through chores. 

 

Now, it’s been a few years since those rocky times. Scott’s gotten ahold of his Alpha Werewolf self, pulled up his grades enough to graduate the year after the rest of them. At least in his too-forgiving-and-trusting-Scotty-ways that’s gotten them into more binds than Scott knows about. He’s never the on to be kidnapped right after letting the latest evil go because ‘they’re giving them a chance!’ Being the perceived human of the pack has more than enough downsides. If Stiles were simply human, he would have been dead years ago. 

 

* * *

 

“Oh, come on! Don’t you think chains are a bit overdone?” Stiles asks the masked hag in front of him as she orders her ghoul familiars to shackle him to the wall. “Ropes would have been more than enough, and far cheaper.”

 

They strap him up, ignoring his sound reasoning. Two nights ago, the pack caught them digging up yet another grave. Who knew ghouls needed to eat so much? In his True Alpha ways, Scott offered them a deal to leave Beacon Hills, the idiot. It’s like he’s never listened to a single word anyone’s said about the Nematon’s power. Now Stiles’ jeans are going to get stained by ghoul juices. He’s tempted to give Scott a bill one of these days. 

 

“I’d offer you a deal again, but we both know it’d just end in your death anyway,” Stiles continues on. 

 

The hag tosses her mask aside. “The only deal I’ll be making with you is with your bones in a summoning spell,” she says. Her breath is almost as vile as her companions. 

 

“And there it is! Who’s surprised? Oh wait, no one. No hag needs ghouls let alone six bodies to feed them in a month unless they’re up to something heinous.”

 

“Seven, now. Just as many as I need,” she hisses. Stiles grimaces at her smile that’s tainted by her black teeth.

 

Stiles got his answer and is way more than ready for this little party to be over. He hums a few bars, considering his options. What would be the best fuel for his fire? He focuses back on a memory from last year. Finding Peter just outside hearing range from the Hale house. It was the anniversary of the fire. Although the house is standing again (with some much needed improvements like a panic room), Stiles felt all of Peter’s pain as if both he and the house were still burning. 

 

He begins to sing. 

 

The hag turns away from him, uninterested in the musings of her victim. Her ghouls, though? They feel the pressure of his notes first. The foul things look to her as if she was casting something, but before their slow, febrile minds can try to understand what’s happening, their minds are consumed by the overwhelming pain. Their flailing and screaming regain their master’s attention. 

 

“What is--” she stops dead when she makes eye contact with Stiles. He smiles wide, shifting from just notes to words. A spell he’d picked out of one of Deaton’s books. 

 

After telling Stiles he has the Spark, Deaton let him come to his office and learn from him. At first it was grueling. The boredom nearly had Stiles shoving mistletoe down his own throat for something more interesting to happen than werewolf diplomacy lessons. Sure, he knew he wanted that knowledge, but Deaton needs to brush up on his teaching methods because they are severely lacking. The vet really didn’t appreciate hearing it from him, though. 

 

A month of that bullshit and Deaton let Stiles look at his books, but only ones he offered and under his supervision. Stiles didn’t blame the guy. He doesn’t want to know (read: desperately wants to know) the horribly, powerful things he must be hiding in some of those dusty tomes. Deaton would have to be an idiot to let Stiles near them, at least the ones he could possible use. 

 

Stiles asked for a book from him a few months back containing spells used by “mythical creatures” and only by them by. Deaton was confused asking why Stiles would want to waste his time with something he can’t use. 

 

“Please, we both know that the more I learn the better prepared we can be. Remember me sitting through all the werewolf body language for peace treaties stuff? Boring, but I can see how it’s useful.”

 

Deaton crossed his arms. “And this book can be helpful how?”

 

“If we run into some creature of the deep and don’t know it because what’s going on is clearly magic could cost us serious time and injuries...hopefully not deaths. If I can learn even a little bit of what could be out there gunning for us, it’ll be worth the few hours it took to learn,” Stiles explains, looking anywhere but at his mentor. Apparently his spiel worked. He got the book and immediately flipped to the section on emotion-based creatures, making a mental note flipping past the entry on banshees. 

 

Reading about his own kind in a printed book was a lot different than reading his mom’s words. The book talked about how empaths aren’t that useful and usually die or go insane before adulthood. He sat up a little straighter at that, proud that for once he knew something books didn’t and not the other way around. Despite that gloomy opener, the book did have some useful spells empaths can connect with their emotional releases for some quiet interesting effects. Like making someone experience burning to death with no flames or evidence. 

 

The hag staggered forward. Each movement looked pain and mechanical as she came back to stand in front of him. 

 

“The pain will stop when I’m out of these shackles,” Stiles told her, putting a pause on the spell. 

 

She scrabbled against the bonds, undoing them as quickly as she could. The effort forces her knees out from under her. He stands up and watches her trying to hack away the feeling of smoke in her lungs. 

 

“You should have just used rope. It would have made this part a lot easier on us both,” Stiles says with a grimace. 

 

He pulls in a breath to sing the next, fatal line of the spell. 

 

“Stiles?” A yell comes echoing through the cave. He stops. He can’t kill her without hurting whoever the hell decided now would be the best time to come save him. 

 

The footsteps grow closer. Before the hag can regain her wits, Stiles steps on her chest both holding her in place and making sure she can’t breathe a word of what she’s witnessed. 

 

Of all people, Peter comes into the room with claws out, ready to eviscerate whoever took him. His electric blues zero in on Stiles. 

 

“I’m fine so don’t get all--ooookay. Never mind,” Stiles says with a huff while Peter sniffs, checking for the scent of blood. He bares his teeth turning to the hag beneath Stiles’ shoe. 

 

“You’ll wish I let you die here on this floor for touching him,” Peter growls at her. The hag’s eyes go wide as she struggles to take another breath. He pressed down harder on her chest. 

 

“That’s totally unnecessary, dude. I can just--”

 

Peter turns his gaze back on Stiles. His eyes gone from fierce protection to curiosity, one of Stiles’ least favorite looks on him since it usually involves Peter’s creative games at his expense. 

 

“You can just what? Kill her? We don’t want our dear Emissary-In-Training getting his hands dirty, now do we?” Peter asks with a grin, fangs receding. 

 

Stiles rolls his eyes. He reaches over to the table to grab the athane. While it’s a little dull, he’s done more with less. Peter doesn’t move to stop him. Instead, he takes a step back out of the splatter zone and watches him intently. Stiles lifts his foot off of the hag for a moment, but doesn’t give her a chance to get a word out before she’s bleeding out. 

 

“Nicely done,” Peter says with an appreciative tone. “It’s almost like you’ve done this kind of thing before.”

 

“Peter,” he sighs, wiping the blood off the athane on the ratty clothes of one of the ghouls before tying it to his belt loop. Waste not want not. Stiles can’t afford new drumsticks let alone a decent athane. He’s been using a butter knife for the better part of a month now since he dad found out where the “good knife” had run off to. “Can we not play this little game?”

 

He raises an eyebrow. “I’m not playing a game, Stiles. Just making a comment,” Peter says. He turns on his heel, stepping over a ghoul, and walks to the entryway of the offshoot in the cave. “Coming?”

 

He wants to make some joke at Peter’s (or his own) expense, but all Stiles can think about it heading to the lake to sing for a while. He’s gotten pretty damn good with his shield, especially after Deaton taught him about sigils, but death always hangs over him, dripping over his skin like venom trying to burn its way into his veins. Stiles needs a release.  _ Dammit!  _ Now he’s really wishing he could make a joke about Peter asking him to come. 

 

Outside, the waning crescent can’t be seen past the wispy, grey clouds hanging over Beacon Hills. Without its light, Stiles has no clue where he’s going and, regrettably, follows Peter through the trees hoping he won’t be an asshole and lure him in a ditch for the fun of it. Peter slows his walk down enough so their side by side. The crunching of the leaflitter under their shoes is the only sound beyond the wind in the trees. Stiles can’t stand it. 

 

“How’d you know?” he asks. 

 

Peter flicks his eyes sideways at Stiles for a second. “Scott’s well-meaning plans never go how he hopes. It was only a matter of time.”

 

“That’s not really an answer, creeper wolf.”

 

He catches a glimpse of Peter’s smirk through the darkness as the low light glints off of his teeth. Stiles is a little miffed he can’t make out the crows feet around Peter’s eyes he knows are there. He won’t admit it out loud, but Stiles thinks Peter looks his best when he’s smiling, younger and lighter like he wasn’t carrying around the same weight that Derek hunches down under. 

 

“Okay, if you knew  _ something  _ was going to happen, fine, but how’d you find me? Were you following me?” Stiles asks, shooting off whatever he can think of to keep Peter talking. When he focuses on his words, he doesn’t notice the thrum of concern mingling with curiosity coming off of Peter in pulses. Stiles swallows. If Peter’s been following him around…

 

“Please, I’m not my nephew. I trust my instincts. Your pack bond felt wrong like you were in distress, so I listened to it,” he says as if that explains anything when it clearly just gives Stiles more questions.

 

“You feel my pack bond?” 

 

Peter sighs. “Yes, Stiles,” he answers in a sing-song voice as if he was trying to appease a child. “It’s almost like we’re pack or something.”

 

Punching Peter would be a bad idea. It would hurt Stiles hand a lot more than him, but he really wants to slap that tone out of his voice. He’s too tired to act on the impulse. 

 

* * *

 

Closing the front door behind himself, Stiles felt the bubbling need for music. With his dad asleep upstairs, he didn’t want to wake him up filled with all the feelings building up inside Stiles chest and Peter probably isn’t that far yet. He has to wait. 

 

He goes up to his room, not acknowledging his shaking hands as he pulls on the handle. Stiles takes his time changing out of his dirty jeans and T-shirt into another pair of jeans and his favorite hoodie.

 

No point in rushing. He wants Peter to have enough distance between him and his house that he won’t notice him slipping back out into the woods. He doesn’t  _ know  _ that Peter will hang back for a bit, but he’d rather not risk explaining himself. 

 

Stiles sneaks past his dad’s room into the bathroom with the bloody athane in hand. Openly carrying a murder weapon in his house probably isn’t the most sound idea, come to think of it, but he’s always been a risk taker. It cleans off easily with a little soap. He makes a note to properly cleanse it before adding it to his rituals, but that’s future-Stiles’ problem. For now, it’ll live on his bookshelf, waiting. It’d probably look out of place if Stiles’ room wasn’t already a disaster zone from an evidence wall to his homework sprawled over his desk and bed. 

 

Shit, homework. He sits down to at least look at his chemistry worksheet, pointedly ignoring the building pressure in his chest. After an hour of fiddling with the assignment and only filling in three blanks, Stiles calls it. 

 

The way to the lake is a familiar one. Even with what little light there is, Stiles makes his way along the overgrown path to his favorite side of the shore. Out here, he can’t feel the thrum of people around. Between his personal and packs bonds, Stiles isn’t never fully without feedback, but this is as close as he’s come to peace. He’s free and safe to be himself. 

 

The water is like black ink just before the pen dips in, still in patient waiting. Stiles flops down on a mushroom and moss coated stump to tug off his shoes. He strips down to his Star Wars boxers and lets out a harsh puff of air. This is gonna be cold. 

 

Claudia solely used music to dull the ever-present pulse of emotions around her. In the end, having only one release just wasn’t enough. With the aftereffects of the Hale fire, she needed to get out more than ever before, but didn’t have the means. It overtook her. 

 

John still doesn’t know that’s what killed his wife because she never told him. She’d only written it in the back of her last journal, begging Stiles to connect with multiple somethings to help him stay balanced. In the nights his dad is neck deep in waves of grief and sadness when John asks the void why his wife was taken from him so earlier, Stiles wishes he could say something. But how do you tell someone their own emotions, something they can’t control were partly responsible for killing the greatest love of their life?

 

The first time he connected with nature, Stiles was terrified. He didn’t know it was possible. People have emotions. That’s what he’d understood, but the more he paid attention the more he realized how little he knew. Emotions can be anywhere--connected to objects, places. All living things feel and leave those feelings behind.  _ All  _ living things. 

 

As his toes breach the water, Stiles’ chest calms knowing what is to come. The lake’s essence reaches up to meet him, lapping gently around his ankles. He follows the pull of the lake, stepping further into it. As it comes up to meet him, he places his palms against the surface. As his chest expands and contracts, the water moves with him, gently coaxing him into saying what’s weighing down on him so heavily. 

 

He closes his eyes, letting his voice take over. Stiles lets himself pour out in his words. Scott’s stubborn self-righteousness, Derek’s still-bitter grief that permeates every room he’s in, the pain soaked into the Hale property, the hag’s pain as she was tortured by Stiles’ spell and eventual death all drip away into the water from his impromptu song. His eyes sting under the relief of letting go. 

 

The melodic vibrations travel over the water, reaching the other side of the lake and dissipate into the treeline. He feels the earth take in his emotional weight gladly. The preserve pulls all the foreign energy out of him, leaving Stiles as just himself again. He sinks into the water, accepting its comfort. 

 

His song peters out into a hum as he floats on his back, letting the lake support him through the raw fragility of release. The sounds of the wild slowly return as if their volume had been turned down so they could hear Stiles’ cry. In between the lapping of water at his ears, he hears the leaves shuffling in the wind and insects singing their own songs. Floating, he takes in their collective song just as they took in his. 

 

As he drifts, he doesn’t feel the eyes watching him from the tree line. He doesn’t feel the unflitered awe rolling off of the person crouched in the shadows let alone the underlying desire. Stiles just lets the lake overtake him, lulling him to sleep in the curling tendrils of waves. 

**Author's Note:**

> thank you so freaking much for reading! 
> 
> i have a lot of ideas for this, but i wanna know what you think! where do you think it's going? anything you wanna see? this is my first steter wip and i am *so* open to suggestions. <3
> 
> find me on [tumblr](http://bialiencowboy.tumblr.com/)


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